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General Systems Theory (GST)
1. Introduction
The profession of social work depends on a scientific foundation. It is based on theories derived from different disciplines, humanities and social ranks to provide importance to the social work practices. Theories provide a mechanism to understand the psychological and the social characteristics of personality. In addition, theories elucidate different approaches to deal with individuals, families, institutions and societies at preventive, therapeutic and developmental levels. Given that there are many social work theories, a professional social worker would be able to exploit some theories and exclude others as deemed appropriate in order to interpret problems and develop balanced intervention strategies according to available data and possibilities. There is, indeed, no specific theory that could comprehensively explain human behavior; therefore a good social worker would employ one or more theories to understand his client‟s behavior.
General Systems Theory (GST) is widely used in the field of social work (Rodway, 1986). Most practices in social work utilize concepts stemmed from GST. For example, feedback, client system and helping system became well-established concepts in the field. Moreover, GTS serves as a theoretical framework for many approaches such as family therapy approach. This approach is based on GST where the goal is to understand the dynamics, relationships and roles within families and how these things affect individuals therein.
GST has significant impacts on the practices of social workers. It helps them, for instance, to develop the “person-in-situation” approach to a broader “person-in- environment” approach. The former has failed to integrate the concept into the
practice while the latter has worked out successfully. This approach enables social workers to understand clients within a bio-psychological and spiritual framework and allows them to integrate remedies and related issues into the helping process (Dziegielewski, 2009). Having said that, the researcher will undertake to examine the GST since it is related to the study.
2. General System Theory Definition
A contemporary approach in social work is to look at social units such as individuals, families, group of persons, institutions, or societies as a system. Skyttner (2005) claims that a system is a set of interacting units or elements that form an integrated whole intended to perform some functions. Derek Hitchins (as cited by Skyttner, 2005) has emphasized that a system is a collection of interrelated entities such that both the collection and the interrelationships together reduce local entropy. Generally, a system is concerned with interaction between two or more units.
General Systems Theory is the interdisciplinary study of complex systems. It is a process of theory construction which focuses on building universal concepts, postulates, and principles. In this context, the term systems refer to self-regulating systems that are self-correcting through feedback. The basic notion of GST is derived from the concept of tissue that is made up of cells working together to perform a specific function. Any disorder in cells will have negative effects on the tissue and consequently on the body. Therefore, every cell has to interact with other cells to save the body. GST tends to view any system as the result of a dynamic interrelationship between its component parts and its whole. It
(Minqirius, 2008). Parsons suggested the four basic functions that all social systems must perform if they are to persist as follows (Parsons, 1970):
- Adaptation: The capacity of society to interact with the environment.
- Goal attainment: The capability to set goals for the future and make decisions accordingly.
- Integration: The harmonization of the entire society is a demand that the values and norms of society are solid and sufficiently convergent.
- Latency: Latent pattern maintenance, challenges society to maintain the integrative elements of the integration requirement above. In this regard, the theory assumes that individuals should be directed towards a particular goal in order to attain it because there is always a motivation behind individual behavior. Through social action, the individual is restricted within a group of social values and norms. He, therefore, is not totally free to act out of that values and norms.
2.1 Concept of Social System According to Parsons (1970), social system is group of individuals interacting together or organizations integrated together in a frame of common culture and values. G. Hearn (1979) defined it as an organized framework of reciprocal relationships between functions and ends, and between ends and its means and motives.
A system is a self-organized thing comprising of interrelated relationships within certain entities ( Sadhan, 1991). Othman et al. (1993) argued that a system is a
set of integrated units aiming to achieve an object in social frame. Al-Dakhil (2006) suggested that a system is a set of components have interrelated and mutual relationships and boundaries. The system can be physical, mechanic, social or a combination of two or more. Afifi (2012) concludes the system as a whole which consists of subsystems interacting together to save the whole system. To sum up, the research will define a system as a meaningful interaction between two or more things where each one of them clearly affects the other.
2.2 Types of System There are two types of systems as follows:
- Open system: it is a system in exchange of matter with its environment, presenting import and export, building-up and breaking-down of its material components (Bertalanffy, 1968).
- Closed system: it is a system that exchanges energy, but not matter, with its environment (Bertalanffy, 1968).
2.3 Elements of the System In order to study the systems present in our society within the framework of General System Theory, it is essential that each element within the systems are properly scrutinized. The systems are generally made of elements such as environment, output, input, throughput, feedback, equilibrium and boundaries.
Environment: The elements outside a system that could potentially affect all or part of the system. It is made up of various other systems outside a particular system
- Every system has unique boundaries that distinguish it from other systems.
- Inputs interact with the system, which leads to growth in positive and negative goals. In turn, this growth would appear as an input to another system.
- Inputs loop back into the system as feedback. 4.Every system has subsystems that work together to execute functions. Any disturbance in the functions will have ramifications throughout subsystems.
- There are inactive subsystems that retard human systems (Othman et al. (1993).
Figure 1 :The model of general system theory(palaeos.com/cosmic)
2.4 Characteristics of the System In general system theory, every social system has its own set of smaller systems with different characteristics. These characteristics distinguish the identity and nature of a particular system with another. The characteristics as established in general system theory are:
a. The system as a whole is different from units. b. Change in a unit has consequences on other units. c. Relationships among units of system are spontaneous. d. System is a self-order.
Pincus and Minahan theorize that there are four basic systems in social work practice as follows:
- Change agent system: is composed of professionals who are employed specifically for the purpose of creating planned change.
- Client system: is composed of the people who sanction or ask for the change from agents‟ services, who are the expected beneficiaries of the service, and who have a working agreement or contract with the change agent.
- Target system: is composed of the people, agencies, and organizational practices that the worker wishes to change in some measurable way to reach the goals of the change agent
- Action system: to describe those with whom the social workers works to accomplish the tasks and achieve the goals of the change effort. To help in apprehending problems, the model suggests a strategy to make a planned intervention in social work. Intervention aims to help individuals, families and groups to meet their needs and issues. The intervention follows steps such as assessing problem, collecting data, making initial contact, negotiations and contracts, and executing the action system. To further understand, the next section explains these steps.
2.8 Intervention Steps of Pincus-Minahan Model in Social Work on the Light of GST GST would be of great help if related to the practice. Intervention is the approach that reflects practice in social work. Social workers should precisely define
intervention to provide a pivotal result for his intervention. For effective intervention, a social worker should apply following steps:
- Assessing problem: To assess the problem, one must organize it into steps and correctly carry out steps. These steps are: a. Identifying the problem. b. Identifying the objectives for intervention. c. Identifying the tasks that help to achieve the objectives. d. Identifying an approach to assess the expected outcome.
- Data Collection: An important step to reach a valid outcome. Data-gathering methods usually involve direct or indirect interactions with individuals. Direct interactions are such as interviews and observations while indirect interactions use secondary data methods to collect data.
- Initial contact: In a professional realm, individuals may be conservative where the individual is not easy accepting changes around him. Social workers should make strategies to help individual accept changes. Therefore, initial contact is important to give a good impression which would make the individual comfortable enough to accept instructions given by the social worker.
- Negotiation and contract: After communicating with the individual, the social worker should persuade the individual to implement objectives. This should be done on the basis of mutual negotiation to contract while finding appropriate means for implementing objectives.
balance that may not be perfect. Tensions may accompany relationships during interaction between the student and other social system networks, for instance, Facebook and twitter. As a result, the student as human system receives inappropriate inputs which consequently will have negative outputs. These outputs affect the student‟s social relationships. In turn, that would have ramifications on the self-system of the student. The social worker should try to harmonize between the student system and other systems in order to rebalance the inputs and outputs. In such cases, the social worker can play an important role to assess the overall case in the frame of whole. He should follow a systematic approach by assessing the problem and collecting data. Then he should take further action by intervening to modify systems and utilize different methods e.g. negotiation and contract. In an event that student system suffers from inertia, where inputs do not match outputs, the social worker should utilize psychology of self to align the personality. The researcher concludes that the profession of social work in the frame of GST has influential impacts on student‟s social relationships because it controls inputs and outputs.
2.9 Importance of General Systems Theory (GST) as a Framework of Inquiry General Systems Theory contributes a trans-disciplinary framework to study the simultaneous and normative interactions between the perception and conception in numerous contexts in the society (Laszlo & Krippner, 1998). This approach is gaining importance particularly in the research of development based on cognitions and human perceptions (Nisbett et al., 2001). The observation of different social as well as natural phenomena in their natural environments and contexts involves complicated interactions and often requires the expertise of numerous disciplines. Therefore, the
use of a holistic and multi-disciplined approach is crucial in the study of such interactions. The General Systems Theory contributes as a multidiscipline framework to enable social work researchers to transcend their boundaries in studying different phenomena of the society (Greene, 1999). As such, the theory is also regarded as a field or framework of inquiry instead of a collection of different disciplines. For the application in research of human perception, General Systems Theory models complicate interactions within and between individuals as well as between groups without having to reduce the phenomenon of perceptions to individual simulative levels (Laszlo &Krippner, 1998). The theory enables the capitalization of parallelism in various explanations across disciplines and is used as a medium in conducting an integrated study regarding the complexity in the area of social interactions (Laszlo & Laszlo, 1997).
General Systems Theory brings an important contribution to social work. It exhibits the highest clarity in the field of social work as compared to other theoretical frameworks through a few concepts that draw the light on complementary interactions that forms the whole constitution of a system (Parsons et al., 2001). In the aspect of social interactions, the theory focuses on the interactions between individuals, groups and communities as well as the factors that influence their environments (Rooney & Rooney, 2010). For the contemporary practices of social work, the holistic approach of this theory is commonly being implemented into their strategy and techniques of intervention. This is due to the recognition of the importance of acknowledging the inter-relation of individuals with their natural environment as well as their anthropogenic environments such as the virtual social networkings (Turner, 2011).
research questions are part of the research problem and therefore, the formulation of the research questions is a main process when designing the conceptual framework. The combination of research objectives and research problems is used for the justification of the research and to highlight the significance of the study (Järvinen, 2000).
From the review of literature in the previous chapter, a conceptual framework has been formed in this study. The conceptual model of this study hypothesizes that the social media intervention such as the social network sites (Facebook and Twitter) has an impact on the formation of social relations among the university students in Saudi Arabia and the strengthening of their cultural and religious identity. In addition, it has been hypothesized that social communication networks such as Facebook and Twitter offer elements that could be used to enhance social support interventions and in developing social policy to strengthen the social relations among the members of the community, which include the participation in contributing and distribution of users‟ personal information revealed to other users. Based on this theory, an assumption has been formed that social communication networks are significant and efficient on supporting different functions of the society and in the development of social policy due to the high volume of usage and participation of the members of the society contributed by the proliferation of Internet usage and the growth in the information technology and mobile devices industry.
The framework includes a discussion of the research design using the holistic approach of General Systems Theory (GST) to evaluate the intervention of social media on the interactions between individuals, groups and communities. GST is an interdisciplinary approach used to study complex systems (Skyttner, 2005). In the
field of social works, the theory enables social work researchers to transcend their boundaries in studying different phenomena of the society (Laszlo &Krippner, 1998). It is due to the challenge of observing different social phenomena in their natural environments and contexts which involve complicated interactions. Therefore, the approach enables the integration of different disciplines using a holistic and multidiscipline approach to study such interactions (Parsons et al., 2001). Using a more holistic approach, the impact of social network sites (Facebook and Twitter) on the formation of social relations among the university students in Saudi Arabia is determined from various aspects of the social communication among the research subjects namely, intrapersonal, interpersonal and inter-group and community factors.
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Sadhan Huda,(1991), towards a holistic model proposed for the role of social service in the face of the impact of renal failure on Saudi women to perform their family, social service College, unpublished PhD thesis
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Figure 1 :The model of general system theory(palaeos.com/cosmic)
